ChainScience 2024

The Chainscience conference brings together academics, practitioners and industry experts across disciplines to discuss novel developments in the domain of distributed ledger technologies. For Chainscience’s second edition, this year we are gathering in Switzerland, hosted by the University of Zürich, in co-occurrence with Ethereum. At the heart of Chainscience lies the firm belief that Bitcoin’s whitepaper started a phenomenon that cannot be fully embraced by a single field of research, but has an inherently inter-disciplinary nature, living in the union of informatics, business, economics, finance, regulation, law, mathematics, physics and complexity science.
This is why Chainscience was born, with the purpose of building bridges between different disciplines and practitioners, and the ambition to advance and promote high-quality research in Blockchains and Distributed Ledger technologies. As a block has value because it belongs to the chain, we hope Chainscience’s value will emerge out of the diverse and different approaches it will host, according to the motto: ’The whole is more than the sum of its parts’.

In structure, ChainScience follows the traditional open format primarily based on submitted and peer-reviewed works.

Important Dates

*Time sensitive submissions will be evaluated until March 8, 2024

Call for Papers

Submission Instructions

We invite the submission of posters and full papers. All submissions must use the Ledger templates; a LaTex and a Word template are available.

We invite the submission of posters and full papers. All submissions must use the Ledger templates; a LaTex and a Word template are available.

ChainScience uses a double-blinded review process; author names and affiliations should not appear in the submission, and authors should make a reasonable effort not to reveal their identities or institutional affiliations. Submissions that do not comply with these guidelines will be desk-rejected.
• For posters, please limit extended abstracts to no more than 2 pages; poster abstracts should include at least one figure.
• Full papers may include up to 12 pages, excluding references and appendices. Appendices will not be considered as part of the review process.

Please submit all manuscripts through the EasyChair portal.

Publication

All accepted submissions will be published in post-conference proceedings.
• Proceedings will be made available via arXiv.
• Accepted papers that appear in the proceedings will be indexed via DBLP.
• Selected full papers may be invited for submission to a special issue of the Ledger Journal.
• Full and short papers may be invited for submission to Frontiers in Blockchain.

Conflict of Interest

Authors and Programme Committee members are required to indicate any possible conflict of interest. Potential conflicts of interest
include:
• Advisor-advisee relationships, at any time;
• Professional collaborations, employer/employee relationships, or co-authorship within the past 5 years;
• Current institutional conflicts;
• or close personal relationships.

For accepted manuscripts, at least one author must attend. For content, formatting, or submission details, please contact the Programme Committee Chair Nicolò Vallarano (nicolo.vallarano@uzh.ch).

Keynote Speakers

Invited Speaker

Conference Organisation

Program

Friday 05/04/2024

Registration

Time: 09:00 – 10:00
Coffee will be served.

Welcome Speech 

Time: 10:00 – 10:15 
Speaker: Professor Claudio J. Tessone, Chairman and Academic Director of the Blockchain Centre, University of Zurich 

Keynote Talk: “Can decentralized systems be truly “democratizing” – and how?” 

Time: 10:15 – 11:15 
Speaker: Professor Dr. Bryan Alexander Ford, EPFL 
Abstract: Internet technologies have often been called “democratizing” by virtue of giving anyone a voice in countless online forums. Technology cannot actually be “democratizing” by democratic principles, however, unless it serves everyone, offers everyone not just a voice but an equal voice, and is accountable to and ultimately governed by the people it serves. Today’s technology offers not democracy but guardianship, subjecting our online lives to the arbitrary oversight of unelected employees, committees, platforms, and algorithms, which serve profit motives or special interests over our broader interests. Can we build genuinely democratizing decentralized technology that serves its users inclusively, equally, and securely? A necessary first step is digital personhood: enabling technology to distinguish between real people and fake accounts such as sock puppets, bots, or deep fakes. Digital identity approaches undermine privacy and threaten our effective voice and freedoms, however, both in existing real-world democracies and in online forums that we might wish to embody democratic ideals. An emerging ecosystem of “proof of personhood” schemes attempts to give willing participants exactly one credential each while avoiding the privacy risks of digital identity. Proof of personhood schemes may operate in the physical world or online, building on security foundations such as in-peron events, biometrics, social trust networks, and Turing tests. We will explore the promise and challenges of secure digital personhood, and the tradeoffs of different approaches along the key metrics of security, privacy, inclusion, and equality. We will cover further security challenges such as resisting collusion, coercion, or vote-buying.

Presentations Session: Blockchain Efficiency and Applications 

Time: 11:15 – 12:30 

• “Blockchain in a box: A portable blockchain network implementation on Raspberry Pi’s” 
  Matija Piškorec, Anton Ivaskevich, Said Haji Abukar, Lundrim Azemi, Md Rezuanul Haque, Mostafa Chegenizadeh, and Claudio Juan Tessone 
  Time: 11:15 – 11:35 
• “Enhancing the Efficiency of Blockchain Transaction Fees: Predicting Gas Usage Proactively with Machine Learning in the EIP-1559 Era” 
  Jingfeng Chen, Wanlin Deng, Dang-Xing Chen, and Luyao Zhang (Duke Kunshan University) 
  Time: 11:35 – 11:55 
• “Advancing Blockchain Scalability: A Linear Optimization Framework for Diversified Node Allocation in Shards” 
  Björn Assmann, and Samuel J. Burri (DFINITY Foundation) 
  Time: 11:55 – 12:15 
  

Lunch 

Time: 12:30 – 14:00 
Lunch Bags will be served at the conference venue. 

Invited Talk: “Empirical research of complex crypto asset ecosystems” 

Time: 14:00 – 14:45 
Speaker: Ass.-Prof. Dr. Svetlana Abramova, University of Innsbruck 
Abstract: Crypto asset ecosystems represent an ever growing and remarkably heterogeneous group of individuals in terms of their attitudes, preferences, usage patterns, risk profiles, and behaviour. One may expect crypto asset investors to be highly vigilant, yet they remain vulnerable to targeted attacks, accidental threats, scams, and financial losses. This talk will characterise the global community of cryptocurrency investors by introducing the identified user personas, their motives and experiences. A special focus of the talk will be devoted to a discussion of the key methodological challenges which complicate empirical studies of this population. 

Presentations Session: Blockchain Efficiency and Applications 

Time: 14:45 – 16:00 

• “A Simple Characterization of MEV” 
  Nicola Dimitri (University of Siena) 
  Time: 14:45 – 15:05 
• “Investigating Similarities Across Decentralized Financial (DeFi) Services” 
  Junliang Luo (School Of Computer Science, McGill University), Stefan Kitzler (Complexity Science Hub Vienna), and Pietro Saggese (IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca) 
  Time: 15:05 – 15:25 
• “Exploring the Impact: How Decentralized Exchange Designs Shape Traders’ Behavior on Perpetual Future Contracts” 
  Erdong Chen, Mengzhong Ma, and Zixin Nie (Nanyang Technological University) 
  Time: 15:25 – 15:45 

Poster Session 

Time: 16:00 – 17:00 

• “A Comprehensive Taxonomy of Cryptoeconomic Systems” 
  Alican Alaşık and Nihan Yıldırım (Istanbul Technical University) 
• “An attack simulation on Ethereum” 
  Benjamin Kraner, Nicolò Vallarano, and Claudio Juan Tessone (University of Zurich) 
• “The Emergence of Liquid Staking” 
  Benjamin Kraner, Nicolò Vallarano, and Claudio Juan Tessone (University of Zurich) 
• “Crypto Market Regimes” 
  Deborah Miori (University of Oxford) and Nicolo Vallarano (University of Zurich) 
• “Arbitrage between AMM and CEX” 
  Krzysztof Gogol (University of Zurich), Johnnatan Messias (Matter Labs), Deborah Miori (University of Oxford), Benjamin Kraner (University of Zurich), Benjamin Livshits (Matter Labs), and Claudio Tessone (University of Zurich) 
• “A Blockchain-Based Platform for Incentivizing Blood Donation” 
  Parminder Kaur Makode, Sina Rafati Niya, and Claudio Tessone (University of Zurich) 
• “An exploration on churning efficiency against overseer attacks” 
  Raffaele Cristodaro, Nicolò Vallarano, and Claudio Tessone (University of Zurich) 
• “Preliminary study on the network controllability of ERC-20 transfer networks on the Ethereum mainnet” 
  Taehoon Kim (University of Zurich) 
• “Analyzing SEC’s Regulatory Actions Against Major Crypto Exchanges: A Comparative Study” 
  Timur Magzhanov (Bocconi University) 
• “P2P network formation model: the Stellar protocol” 
  Yu Gao, Nicolò Vallarano, Matija Piskorec, and Claudio Tessone (University of Zurich) 
  

Presentations Session: Law and Privacy 

Time: 17:00 – 18:15

• “New Approaches to Old Problems?  Thinking About a New Design of the  AML/CFT Strategy” 
  Chiara Ferri (University of Florence – University of Camerino) 
  Time: 17:00 – 17:20 
• “Designing Web3 Infrastructures for Federated Learning: A Path-breaking Solution for Ownership, Privacy, and Trust” 
  Dongfang Wu, Bing Luo, and Luyao Zhang (Duke Kunshan University) 
  Time: 17:20 – 17:40 
• “Privacy in the Digital Economy” 
  Tien Nguyen and Tim Jackson (University of Liverpool Management School) 
  Time: 17:40 – 18:00 
  

Conference Apero and Dinner 

The participants who opted for the conference dinner will enjoy an apero and dinner at the historical location of the Zunfthaus zur Zimmerleuten (Limmatquai 40, CH-8001 Zurich). You can find additional information about the location at https://zunfthaus-zimmerleuten.ch/en/. 

Saturday 06/04/2024 

Presentations Session: Blockchain Applications 

Time: 09:30 – 10:45 

• “Towards Efficient Data Management For IPFS-based Applications” 
  Vero Estrada-Galiñanes, Ahmad Elrouby, and Léo Marc-André Theytaz (EPFL) 
  Time: 09:30 – 09:50 
• “Non-Fungible Programs: Private Full-Stack Applications for Web3” 
  Blake Regalia (Solar Republic LLC) and Benjamin Adams (University of Canterbury) 
  Time: 09:50 – 10:10 
• “A Rollup Comparison Framework” 
  Jan Gorzny and Martin Derka (Zircuit) 
  Time: 10:10 – 10:30 

Coffee Break 

Time: 10:45 – 11:30 
Coffee and snacks will be served at the conference venue. The posters from the poster session will also be on display. 

Keynote Talk: Consensus in blockchains: Overview and recent results 

Time: 11:30 – 12:30 
Speaker: Professor Dr. Christian Cachin, University of Bern 
Abstract: Reaching consensus despite faulty or corrupted nodes is a central question in distributed computing; it has received renewed attention over the last years because of its importance for cryptocurrencies and blockchain networks. Modern consensus protocols in this space have relied on a number of different methods for the nodes to influence protocol decisions. Such assumptions include (1) traditional voting, where each node has one vote, (2) weighted voting, where voting power is proportional to stake in an underlying asset, and (3) proof-of-X, which demonstrates a cryptographically verifiable investment of a resource X, such as storage space, time waited, or computational work. This talk will give an overview of blockchain consensus methods and then highlight recent work on constructing new consensus protocols and analyzing existing ones. 

Lunch 

Time: 12:30 – 14:00 
Lunch Bags will be served at the conference venue. 

Presentations Session: Blockchain Applications 

Time: 14:00 – 15:15 

• “Proof-of-Stake Protocols Modelling: A Extensible Framework for Incentives Design” 
  Sheng-Nan Li (University of Zurich), Jiahua Xu (University College London), Paolo Tasca (University College London), and Claudio J. Tessone (University of Zurich) 
  Time: 14:00 – 14:20 
• “Towards an Optimal Staking Design: Balancing Security, User Growth, and Token Appreciation” 
  Nicolas Oderbolz, Beatrix Marosvoelgyi and Matthias Hafner (Swiss Economics SE AG) 
  Time: 14:20 – 14:40 
• “Deciphering Cross-Chain Transactions between Ethereum and Polygon: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis” 
  Tao Yan, Chuanshan Huang and Claudio J. Tessone (University of Zurich) 
  Time: 14:40 – 15:00 
  

Coffee Break 

Time: 15:15 – 16:00 

Coffee and snacks will be served at the conference venue. The posters from the poster session will also be on display. 

Presentations Session: Crypto-economics 

Time: 16:00 – 17:15 

• “Investigating the Fragility of the Uniswap Market Using a Complex Network Approach” 
  Tao Yan and Claudio J. Tessone (University of Zurich) 
  Time: 16:00 – 16:20 
• “Research Landscape of the novel emerging field of Cryptoeconomics” 
  Alican Alaşık and Nihan Yıldırım (Istanbul Technical University) 
  Time: 16:20 – 16:40 
• “Identifying Price Influencer of Cryptocurrency on Reddit” 
  Tao Yan, Yixuan Wang and Claudio J. Tessone (University of Zurich) 
  Time: 16:40 – 17:00
  

Closing Address

Time: 17:15 – 17:30 
Speaker: Professor Claudio J. Tessone, Chairman and Academic Director of the Blockchain Centre, University of Zurich 

Registration Fees And Policies

A complete and paid registration is required in order to attend the conference.

Authors of full papers, and posters must register by 20th March 2024. At least one author from each submission, even if a student, MUST register at the “Full Participant” or “Student Participant” rate.

Venue

Accommodation

To ensure a comfortable commute and stay, we have hand-picked 3 hotels near the venue. All three hotels will also offer special discounts to the conference attendees. Please make sure you mention this at the counter when booking a room.

Plesea refer to the provided details of the following 3 hotels to arrange appropriate accommodation